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When Apple introduced the iPad Mini, it was the first ever Apple announced that sparked an emotional reaction from your truly. No, it was not excitement or happiness that the company finally reversed a policy put in place by the late Steve Jobs that there is no room for a smaller tablet in the Apple portfolio. My reaction to the iPad Mini announcement was actually disappointment and frustration, maybe even borderline anger.

While the following statement is going to sound funny when taken out of context, I am going to say it anyway. It can’t be easy to be Apple. Relax, I know how much money the company has and I know how far ahead of its competitors it is in the tablet space, but I still stick to my statement.

One of the things I have noticed over the past few years is that technology and the billion dollar industries it creates have gone completely mainstream. While processors, screen resolutions, and data connectivity types were terms used by geeks only a few years back, now, the latest iPhone or Samsung Galaxy is a topic of discussion among pretty much all parts of the population.

Every so often a new technology comes along that you instantly know will be a hit and set a new standard. You know, the original iPhone is an obvious one, but there are other ones that are smaller and also left their impression on the world of technology.

Things like the Kinect, ICQ, the thumb drive, and even different input methods for mobile phones, like Swype.

Well, a new accessory that is now available for preorder for $70 can join the group. It is called The Leap and it basically brings the gestures of Minority Report to real life and let’s be honest, who doesn’t want to be Tom Cruise in Minority Report?

Anyway, multitouch was brought to mainstream consciousness by the iPhone then duplicated by… well, everyone. Gesture recognition was brought to the market with the Wii and Kinect and that is a hot trend right now, as well. Now The Leap combines the two and brings multitouch technology to the world of gesture recognition, and enables us to interact with our computers in a whole new way that is well, unbelievably awesome.

Twitter, as a company, has made its share of mistakes over the years. These include implementing its own retweeting system that makes it significantly more difficult to see how many people retweeted you and who they are (not to mention the fact that when I use the Twitter retweet, I can’t add my two cents to the original tweet, it all kind of defeats the purpose), the Twitter URL shortening service, which seems to break more links than it shortens, or many others. But the good news was that with all these issues, I always had Tweetdeck to fall back on. Then Twitter bought Tweetdeck.

It has been quite a crazy month in and out of the tech industry and while I usually try to post these articles on a weekly basis, clearly, that did not work too well in the last couple of week. But since many (many) people seem to depend on these posts to get up to date, I am forcing myself to get back into the swing of things.

It is that time of the week again, time to sum up all the tech news of the previous week in one easy-to-read blog post. This edition of Above the Fuld is a little shorter than usual, as I was on vacation for three days this week. That means no coverage of the Amazon announcement for example, among other things.

Been a few weeks since I posted one of these due to a vacation. All I can say is, what a month to choose for a vacation. This month will definitely go down in the books as one of, if not the, craziest months in tech ever. Where do we start? I think I summed it up pretty well in this tweet from last week. Everyone who is anyone in tech had something to announce this month. Google, Facebook, HP, Motorola, Apple, Amazon, and Linkedin are just some of the companies that made some noise over the past month.

By now, we all know that “Geek” is the new “Cool”, and I have met my share of geeks in my time, but David Pogue is on a whole new level. David has been writing a weekly personal technology column for the New York times since November, 2000. He also writes a monthly tech column for Scientific American. In addition, David is a featured guest on various TV shows including his CNBC appearances every Thursday, CBS Sunday Morning, and his show “Making Stuff” on PBS.

Developing an app is far from an easy task. As app consumers, we always hear about the success of apps like Angry Birds, Cut the Rope and others. However, as someone said last week at an event I attended, “For every Angry Birds, there are a lot of angry developers”. This is not a post about the challenges of app development, but if we were to sum up two of the major issues developers face, it would be discovery and monetization.